Obama and Biden Attempt To Prove They're Tough By Punching Each Other

We keep waiting for Obama to "take off the gloves" and land an effective punch on McCain -- as Obama has repeatedly promised to do but failed to deliver over the past several weeks. The last twenty-four hours have seen Obama land more blows on his running mate than on the Republican opposition. And for his part, Biden has delivered a series of gaffes and dim witted remarks that must have provoked Obama more than once to ask himself, what was I thinking when I picked this dufus to run for vice president?

As far as we can tell, Biden beats Palin in only one category -- his propensity to make dumb statements. Take, for example, what the senior senator from Delaware (but not senior enough to have been alive during the 1929 Market Crash) had to say about FDR today, as reported by AP:

Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden says today's leaders should take a lesson from the history books and follow fellow Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to a financial crisis.
"When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened,'" Barack Obama's running mate recently told the "CBS Evening News."

Except, Republican Herbert Hoover was in office when the stock market crashed in October 1929.

Oh, and Joe, it was a radio not a television that Roosevelt used to deliver those fireside chats. In case you didn't know, televisions were not mass produced until the latter half of the twentieth century, not the first half.

Biden was also suppose to be the man to deliver all those rural votes from coal mining states for Obama. Instead all he has done is emit his own noxious CO2, as Ben Smith of Politico blogged:

[On] Biden's recent Ohio swing, . . . he was asked by an anti-pollution campaigner about clean coal -- a controversial approach in Democratic circles for which Obama has voiced support, particularly during the Kentucky primary.

Biden's apparent answer: He supports clean coal for China, but not for the United States.

"No coal plants here in America," he said. "Build them, if they're going to build them, over there. Make them clean."

"We’re not supporting clean coal," he said of himself and Obama. They do, on paper, support clean coal.

The answer seems to play into John McCain's case that Obama has been saying "no" to new sources of energy.

Before Obama's people could sequester Biden, he was contradicting his running mate again by saying he was against the bailout of AIG. That inconvenient fact thwarted Obama's attempt to criticize McCain for allegedly changing his position on government intervention to save the insurer, as ABC News reported. Obama was reduced to saying that he thought "Joe should have waited" before giving his opinion on AIG. Not good to have a running mate who tries (and we emphasize, tries) to think for himself on the issues.

But the doozy of the day came when Biden criticized his and Obama's own campaign ad, discussed in earlier posts, that criticized McCain for not being able to type emails, which is the result of the Republican's war injuries. As FoxNews.net reported:

The Delaware Senator took issue with an attack ad from his own side in an interview with CBS, telling Katie Couric that the Obama hit on McCain’s ignorance of computers and technology was “terrible.” The ad paints McCain as out of touch — and all but calls him ancient — but doesn’t mention that the Arizona Senator’s war injuries actually prevent him from using computers for an extended period.

Asked whether he’s disappointed with the tone of the campaign, including the ad that Couric characterized as “making fun of John McCain’s inability to use a computer,” Biden said “I thought that was terrible by the way.

“I didn’t know we did it and if I had anything to do with it, we would have never done it”

It's time to put the gloves back on, gentlemen. Maybe you will do less harm to yourself that way.

Please note: The postings of "G. Morris", written by John K. Bush and which end in 2016, stated his views as of the dates of posting and should not be understood as current assertions of his views. The postings, which have not been altered since they came to an end, remain on this blog to preserve the historical record. In 2017, Mr. Bush took a position that precludes further public political comments or endorsements. He will no longer be contributing to this blog.